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Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
What is revealed by the images of the plates and the relating texts is an imagi¬
nary landscape, an imaginary geography. \ts order and structure may not have been so
rigid and fixed as I have outlined here, but it was undoubtedly intended to organize
the direction of reading and the process of learning for the students as well as their
professors.
While the overall order of the plates seems to follow Linnaeus’s system of classi¬
fication of nature, the particular visual subdivisions or microscenes show up imme¬
diately, so from the beginning to the end (from Table I to Table XIV) the structures
of another order also unfold. The reader/viewer finds himself/herself contemplating
representations of a world geography, the plates conveying stereotyped representa¬
tions of the inhabited world. The reader encounters images that evoke China, the
east-Indian (Spice) islands (Plate I), Middle and North America (Plate II), and
then, rather randomly, western Europe (Plate III), the European “East” (Plate VIII),
“North” (Plate IX), and Africa (plates X and XVI). The instructions of the preface
as well as the introductory passages to certain subsections of Linnaeus’s classification
of plants and animals contain explicit instructions of, or indicate implicitly, how to
move from the immediate, more familiar surroundings and regions to the faraway
and unknown ones.
What the whole procedure reveals is an implied—well-structured and appar¬
ently prefigured—zsopographical/geographical project of reading.’ The principal mes¬
sage toward which the reader has been lead is that the process of gaining knowledge
about nature and society is nothing else but a journey. Reading the schoolbook—
that is, reading, to use another age-old metaphor of historia naturalis, the “book
of nature”—was represented iconographically as well as textually for the young
students of late Enlightenment Europe as an imaginary travel of discovery in Raff's
schoolbook, during the course of which a proper knowledge of things could be
achieved and a (scientific) re-grouping, re-naming, and a new, scholarly re-categoriza¬
tion of the entities of nature encountered could be accomplished. This was probably
one of the most important “intended/implied messages” of the schoolbook, embed¬
ded in the rise of the culture of travel and exploration during the seventeenth and
especially the eighteenth centuries.'”
) For details of the author's conscious geographical method in the teaching of natural history, see es¬
pecially the introduction to “Pflanzenreich.” The preface to the French translation itself emphasizes a
very close connection between the instruction of natural history and geography; the latter following the
former in time but also emerging from it: “En passant des productions indigénes aux productions exo¬
tiques, on sent assez combien il est aisé de faire naître aux enfans le desir de savoir la géographie, première
disposition toujours nécessaire” (emphasis added; Raff 1786: 38.) On the idea of gradual progress and
stadiality implied in late-eighteenth-century concepts of pedagogy and learning, see Te Heesen 2002: 47.
19 Regarding the eighteenth-century travel boom and the emerging travel literature and culture in
western Europe, see Marshall and Williams 1982; Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 2004; and Bohls and Dun¬
can 2005. An excellent collection of studies on early modern-modern travel as a cultural practice is
Elsner and Rubiés 1999.
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